Oprah offers an evening of inspiration for Edmonton fans

Talk-show star Oprah Winfrey brought An Evening With Oprah to Rexall Place on Monday.

Review

Oprah Winfrey

When: Monday night

Where: Rexall Place

EDMONTON - More than one religion first spread through humanity like a grass fire, promising afterlife — a place to escape the various pain and torments of this world. Oprah Winfrey, with an unquestionably pure heart, plays a similar card game of expectation and hope.

In the 58-year-old media entity’s case, however, we’re encouraged to seek a personal utopia, to strike forward with self-determination, confidence and compassion to make not only ourselves, but everything around us better, here and now.

“Every day you get to paint on the canvas that is your life,” she told a sold-out crowd in Rexall Place Monday night, oscillating between serious, spiritual and hilarious, often more than one of these at once — but radiant in a glowing white dress shirt and full-length skirt as luminous as a sunset.

“Why are you here?” she asked hypothetically, summoning Maya Angelou. “You’re here because you’ve been called. Even with our sadness and victories and trials. Everything matters. It does not matter how you got here. It doesn’t matter if you were ignored, welcomed. If you are here sitting in a seat in Edmonton, if you are breathing, you’ve been called. Brought from the ether, from your father’s seed. Imaging all of them swimming, swimming,” she smiled, wiggling her fingers.

Moments before, a gift from Global’s Carole Anne Devaney, Oprah had been handed a set of those ridiculous truck testicles in a parody of Oprah’s Favorite Things, Alberta-style. Bouncing them in her hand, she laughed, “Just what I needed, some bull’s balls.”

And back and forth like so it went for two hours, Oprah reading quotations from her teleprompter, eye on the countdown clock familiar to anyone on TV, then a keen interview with George Stromboulopoulous.

An Evening With Oprah was, after all, a finely tuned show, a mass-hypnotic motivational speech, an advertisement for the Oprah Winfrey Network’s 2013 programming lineup and, because of some of the unfulfilled expectations of the woman’s network so far, an open confessional — like so many people who’d put Lance Armstrong on some sort of pedestal expected of the athlete. Yet few here were anticipating such from one of the most influential human beings to ever walk the earth.

Admitting that her comfort had made her sloppy (she asked the press not to directly quote her on this line, so respect there), Winfrey alluded a number of times to her recent troubles, noting “2012 kicked my butt,” playing a cable video snidely assessing her network’s failure to capture its expected audience.

“I was slaughtered. In every phase of the media, every day I took a bloodbath. Nothing anybody said was any worse that what I already felt about my self.

“So much of the schadenfreude and all the haters, I took credit for it. I was feeling, really, really, really bad. All my mistakes — yours show up in your office, in your home — mine show up on the evening news.”

Asking herself what happened, she went back to sermon and metaphors, quoting Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra and on his birthday, Blue Monday, Martin Luther King Jr., saying we need to listen to the little whispers in our ears before they turn to pebbles, bricks and, in terms of crises, earthquakes. Like a good padre, Winfrey is cloaked in humility at the same time she delivers advice that at the very least feels divine. Though she’s a person who speaks of angels and souls, it’s ultimately the physical world she’s concerned with.

The central irony of the woman is that if everyone actually listened to her advice to listen to themselves, she’d have no audience at all.

Moving through slide shows of her childhood, including a shot of herself pregnant at 14 with a son who never made it, Winfrey gleamed about her life, her ups and downs with weight, even as Steven Spielberg called her to offer her the role in The Color Purple. “He said, ‘If you lose a pound you could lose this part.’ I went to Dairy Queen just in case I had lost half an ounce.’

“That changed the trajectory of my life, that movie did.”

She noted how she learned to say “no,” turning Stevie Wonder down on a charity call. How a crowd of women lurking outside her washroom forced her from immersing herself in public. “That’s fame. I don’t know if you want people applauding when you pee.”

She talked of the decision to stop empowering villains for ratings, from the KKK to a husband who announced on TV his mistress was pregnant. “I was embarrassed for him, as well as myself. I decided I will never allow myself to cause someone to feel shame and humiliation again, serving the audience instead of just showing and telling the audience.”

She noted, “At the end of every show and every interview, including Lance Armstrong, the No. 1 question everyone asks is, ‘Was that OK?’

“You have to take little steps. Maybe Stevie Wonder would not be a little step for you. Everything that I do, including being here tonight in the middle of winter, I thought it out.”

But, she laughed, “I thought I was going to experience Edmonton. I could not even see out the window, that’s a river in front of me! Frozen tundra!

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